Tool Beta
The Ancient World Behind the Text
Pick a passage anywhere in the New Testament. See the customs and ideas a first reader knew without being told.
John 11:1-44, Lazarus four days in the tomb
Jesus waits two days after hearing that his friend Lazarus is ill, reaches Bethany to find him four days buried, weeps with the mourners, and calls him out of the tomb still bound in his grave clothes.
John 11:1-44, in every translation this tool compares.
Martha and Mary send word that their brother Lazarus is ill, but Jesus stays where he is two more days and then says they will go back to Judea, though the disciples remind him that people there had just tried to stone him. By the time he reaches Bethany, near Jerusalem, Lazarus has been in the tomb four days, and many have come from the city to comfort the sisters. Martha says she knows her brother will rise in the resurrection on the last day, and Jesus answers that he is the resurrection and the life. At the tomb he weeps, has the stone taken away despite Martha's warning about the smell, and calls Lazarus out, his hands and feet bound and his face wrapped in a cloth, and tells them to unbind him and let him go.
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- {"u":"https:\/\/jayms.com\/bible-study-tools-2\/ancient-world-ideas\/burial-and-mourning\/","n":"Burial and mourning","s":"Mourners came at once, the dead were buried the same day, wrapped in linen in rock tombs, and family carried the duty of burial. Pagan mourning, with little hope beyond a shadowy underworld, could be bleak.","r":""}
- {"u":"https:\/\/jayms.com\/bible-study-tools-2\/ancient-world-ideas\/resurrection-of-the-dead\/","n":"The resurrection of the dead","s":"Most Jews, with the Pharisees, expected God to raise the dead to bodily life at the end of the age. The Sadducees denied it. Nobody expected one man to rise ahead of everyone else.","r":""}
Bethany was about a day's journey from where Jesus was, so Lazarus may have died before the messengers even reached him (Keener and his notes). Visiting and feeding the bereaved was a duty of piety, and the family spent the first week mourning at home (Keener and his notes). Greek and Roman philosophers prized calm in bereavement; Jesus grieves in the Jewish way, and mourning with the bereaved was counted a virtue (Keener and his notes). After four days decomposition was well under way; later Jewish sources held that the soul hovered near the body for three days and then left, and if that idea was current, no one expected even a miracle worker to bring Lazarus back (Keener and his notes; the ESV Study Bible). The dead were bound tightly in linen, so walking out at all underlines the miracle (Keener and his notes). Wright reads the raising as a signpost and only a signpost: nobody had to untie Jesus' grave clothes, and his own resurrection is of a different order. Bethany, now el-Azariyeh, named for Lazarus, lay under two miles from Jerusalem (the Zondervan Bible dictionary; the Zondervan atlas).
- Craig S. Keener, The IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament, on John 11:6, 11:7-8, 11:17-19, 11:20, 11:28-37, 11:39 and 11:43-44
- NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible, notes on John 11:6, 11:19, 11:20, 11:24, 11:31, 11:35, 11:39 and 11:44
- ESV Study Bible, study notes on John 11:17 and 11:24
- N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, ch. 9, Hope Refocused (1): Gospel Traditions Outside the Easter Narratives
- J. D. Douglas and Merrill C. Tenney, Zondervan Illustrated Bible Dictionary, Bethany
- Carl G. Rasmussen, Zondervan Atlas of the Bible, The Life of Christ and Jerusalem
